We contribute to the literature on the political risk of social security by extending Feldstein and Ranguelova's (2001) methodology for measuring risk in a funded pension system to a pay-as-you-go system. We use the methodology to assess the risk over indexation of benefits in the Czech Republic during the 1990's and early 2000's. The government's discretion over indexations creates both aggregate and individual risk and makes the Czech Republic a particulary interesting case to study. Using data on the actual evolution of benefits for people who retired between 1988 and 1995, we find that retirees faced fairly large volatility in the changes in real benefits - while the mean percentage change was 1.2, its standard deviation was 4.3. This volatility reduces the expected utility of retirees by 0.8 to 1.3 percent of equivalent consumption.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economic Institute, Prague in its series CERGE-EI Working Papers with number
wp318.
Find related papers by JEL classification: H55 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Social Security and Public Pensions D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: